Changing or turning off your Windows swap/page file

You can turn off, move or resize the computer's virtual memory file , aka swap file, aka page file.

If you have enough memory, like me with my 16 GB, you can most often turn it off and never miss it.

This will be a considerable speedup from having your page-file on a regular spinning disk. But, me being a power-user and developer, I have so much going on that the system eventually runs out.

My Computer->Properties and select Settings

Select 'Advanced' tab and then 'Change'

Select the drive you want to edit the page file settings for.

As you can see, you can set it to a custom size or:
Let it be system managed.

Turn it off completely.

Changing Google Chrome's cache folder

Changing Chrome's cache folder to your RAM-disk or someplace else might speed up your browsing quite a bit. Keeping it off a spinning disk will dramatically improve your access time. I suggest not putting this on an SSD, because of wear and tear. Caching trashes the filesystem a lot.

1. Close Chrome and locate your shortcut to Chrome. Optionally, locate the Chrome.exe file itself, and create a shortcut.
2. Right-click the shortcut, and select 'Properties'.
3. Go to the 'Shortcut' tab.
4. In the 'Target' line, there will be something like 'C:\Users\equex\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe'
5. Append after that text in double quotes: --disk-cache-dir="your_drive:\your_folder". This will only move your cache files, which is good enough.
6. If you wanted to move your complete Chrome user-folder, append --disk-user-dir="your_drive:\your_folder", and then copy the contents of the old folder into the new one before you start Chrome again.
7. Click 'Apply' and start Chrome. To verify, look inside your new folder and observe Chrome creating temporary files.

There's a guide for FireFox here.

Moving Windows temporary folders

Change the Windows temporary folders

This page was just a quick write-up to compliment the SSD/RAM-disk tutorial. To let Windows use a custom location for its temporary files, right-click My Computer and select Properties, then do as follows:


Go to 'Advanced System Settings'


Select 'Environment Variables'


Select 'Edit'


Edit the folder locations. The default locations will be inside the Windows folder.